wow Shadowlands Pre-patch Week 3 Raid DPS Rankings and Analysis

[Starym 3,800]

 

Here we are in the middle of the pre-patch and we're taking another look at the Warcraft Logs DPS rankings for Mythic Ny'alotha, as Arcane Mages have snuck their way onto the top of the 95h percentile, even after some nerfs, as Affliction takes the overall throne! We're also checking in with some higher middle of the pack specs in our analysis this time around, as we take a look at Balance Druids and all Rogues, in addition to a note on Warlocks in general.

We'll mention again that some of the results may not be quite as they seem, due to under-representation, especially for Demo Warlocks, Survival Hunters, Frost DKs, Fire Mages and Feral Druids. In general you should check out our article on the reliability of the logs to get a better perspective on them and their relevance.

We'll start with the 95th percentile:

This week we'll also be taking a look at the all the percentiles put together, instead of the usual 50th, where things are much closer and Affliction pulls ahead at the very top:

And finally the actual number of logs, with Wordup's note that anything significantly under 3,000 isn't necessarily exactly accurate:

And now we're on to the really interesting part, the analysis from our guide writers.

All Spec Warlocks by Motoko:

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Following last week's Shadow Priest nerf, Affliction is now the best overall performer by a slight margin, mostly due to very favourable encounter designs that inflate the overall standings, while still retaining good single target capabilities, unlike Destruction which is now lagging behind Demonology in that niche. Destruction still has its strong encounters where it shines, such as N'Zoth or Hivemind, but there is also an argument to be made about how Demonology is still largely unpopular therefore potentially unexplored.

Balance Druid by Bora:

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Balance Druid is seen performing well throughout Mythic Ny'alotha on all ranges of bosses. Landing relatively in the center of the overall charts for the entire instance with the new toolkit, we can take a closer look and see what sticks out overall.

In a bit of a reversal from the standard Battle for Azeroth rankings, we see Balance Druids taking a place among the top specializations on multi-target focused bosses. This comes at the cost of single target focused fights as more power has been put into spells other than Starsurge. Streaking Stars is also on more of a downward trend as secondary stat traits become more viable.

The buff to Starfall was needed and puts it in a usable state on 2 and 3 targets, depending on talents, which helps on these spread multi-target fights which used to be the Balance niche. The spec plays well with all of the late expansion perks, some of which will be lost in Shadowlands. High Haste values with the now baseline Streaking Stars, combined with the power of the new Solstice talent make for some very smooth generation. The procs with Vision of Perfection and Arcanic Pulsar also synergize with Solstice for even more generation and engaging gameplay.

All Spec Rogues by Seliathan:

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At first glance Rogue might look as if it its only a middle-of-the-pack DPS class, but it is still one of the best melee DPS in the game right now. All three Rogue specs are very close to each other in terms of pure DPS output, with Subtlety offering slightly higher single-target damage, while Assassination and Outlaw offer a bit more flexibility with their Azerite traits and stronger AoE damage.

The long awaited rework and rebalancing of Subtlety has made the spec quite a bit more dynamic and offers more room for error without being overly punishing. Losing uptime on a boss or messing up your burst windows during Shadow Dance was an issue that oftentimes kept Subtlety from being a good choice for chaotic and messy progression fights, but the new iteration of the spec is more forgiving in this regard. Combined with the numerical re-balancing, Subtlety has become one of the best performing melee DPS specs the pre-patch has to offer.

Outlaw has kept its tight grasp on being one of the strongest Mythic+ DPS specs in the game and continues to perform very well in this specific setting. The rework to Roll the Bones has not changed the overall gameplay much at all, with re-roll priorities only changing slightly as you no longer fish for specific buffs, instead opting to only re-roll a small number of bad outcomes. It is still a solid spec on single-target, and any boss-fight with regular add spawns is a great fight for Outlaw.

Assassination is dealing with a distinct lack of interactivity, due to the removal of Toxic Blade. It currently only has a single 2-minute cooldown and feels very static, seemingly missing a large piece of the puzzle that will only be re-introduced in Shadowlands. While the gameplay might feel a bit too monotonous at times, the flexibility offered by different Azerite traits allows Assassination to still perform adequately in both raiding and Mythic+ content

That's all for this week and we have 3 more of the pre-patch ahead! Thanks again to Warcraft Logs for their data and for more information on each spec you can check out our pre-patch class guides as well.

[Hypersonic 119]

Will be so hard to choose between my rogue and warlock for the comeback

[sprimm 5]

All of my characters are at the bottom of the list.  All except my BM hunter and Shadow Priest, but I plan to main my Havoc DH (I think)

[Vanquinn 9]

As someone who's been maining outlaw since the start of bfa, and is still playing it now (At a 95+ percentile) The roll the bones change is HORRIBLE. I don't understand how anyone can think it's even moderately okay. You basically play with dead buffs and when there's downtime you can't even spend cps to reset its cd in time to keep it up.

Stop saying it's okay. It's not.

This is coming from someone who knows how to play with single buffs, but when there's 15 seconds left on my ruthless, and I just used between the eyes... that buff is dead for the rest of its duration, and I can't roll off of it. It hurts, and it's not fun. Normally you'd re-roll off of this and keep your momentum going, outlaw was an interactive ramp spec. And don't even get me started on the fact that outlaw can only hit 5 targets with bladeflurry while both sub and sin can fok 8 targets.

Before we had control over our buffs, now we have NONE. All good parses are going to be people who got lucky and got more than 1-2 2 buffs throughout a fight. (I can tell you right now, that getting a 2 buff is RARE AS ALL HELL while raiding.)

Just because something does damage, doesn't mean it's healthy. I swapped off of frost dk in uldir for this exact reason. 50% downtime was NOT okay. I don't care if I'm decimating meters by double of the next person, if it's not fun, it's not fun, and if it's not fun, it's not healthy for the game.

 

Edited November 4, 2020 by Vanquinn

[Ogerscherge 43]

What's the best way to read these logs? Is it fair to assume that, for exampe, Feral is down there because it is also more difficult to play, or are we to assume that all specs are played equally good by their players?

[DahFemur 14]

Don't judge those number too harshly everything will move when the covenant / legendary / conduit / tier set when they will be back later etc , im kind of worry about balancing issue but its certain that those list will move a LOT

[Aegrotat 80]

1 hour ago, Ogerscherge said:

What's the best way to read these logs? Is it fair to assume that, for exampe, Feral is down there because it is also more difficult to play, or are we to assume that all specs are played equally good by their players?

It's a bit complicated. Number of parses plays into it (lower pares means a less accurate over all score), but yes you can consider these players of very similar skill. 95 percentile means it's the top 5% of players for any given spec.

Feral is, unfortunately, just not in a good place what so ever right now.

[Starym 3,800]

6 hours ago, Ogerscherge said:

What's the best way to read these logs? Is it fair to assume that, for exampe, Feral is down there because it is also more difficult to play, or are we to assume that all specs are played equally good by their players?

As mentioned above, there are very few players playing feral right now, so if there's like 20 playing in the 95th percentile, when 5-10 players have a bad week it immediately throws off the numbers massively since there's so few logs from the spec.

Also Ny'alotha  bosses atm are really bad for feral, you should check out the article Wordup wrote about the spec:

 

[Shirushi 7]

All this means nothing for the next expansion though. It doesn't represent the true power of a class/spec because of the essences and azerite traits. I just don't get what the point is to keep reporting this stuff.